Creating tiles and badges (HTML)

This section shows you how to define tile or badge content and send that content as a notification. The content uses local notifications, which are the simplest notifications to implement. Once you understand the basics of tiles and badges, you can apply that knowledge to sending notifications through the other delivery methods: scheduled, periodic, and push. For more information, see Delivering notifications.

The following roadmap suggests a path you should follow as you learn how to define and send tile and badge notifications:

Individual topics in this section give some basic conceptual information, but most assume that you already have some background knowledge. If you are new to this feature, you should first familiarize yourself with tile and badge notification terms and concepts so that you understand what can be done with them and how the parts all fit together. This conceptual material is found under Tiles, Badges, and Notifications.

Install your app and check that your default tile is shown on the Start screen. Then you can begin to update your tile's content through notifications. Quickstart: Sending a tile update is your first step in understanding how to do so. This Quickstart walks you through the full process, from defining a tile's XML content to sending that content as a local notification.

If your app will use a badge on its tile, Quickstart: Sending a badge update will walk you through defining the badge XML content and sending it to your app's tile through a local notification.

This topic shows you how to create or update a badge on a tile. You will send a badge notification that includes either a glyph or numeric value. You will also see how to remove your badge from the tile.

This topic shows how to enable the notification queue on your tile, in this case using local notifications. It also shows how to tag your notification before sending it, to avoid duplicate or out-of-date content in the queue. With the notification queue enabled, Windows will cycle through up to five notifications.